Re: Mozilla mathml project to be interred

net-buoy <[email protected]> wrote on Mon, 5 Oct 2009 14:43:04 -0700
(PDT):

> if we want mathematics notation to be transparent and universal, we
> can't always expect that the user has a server side tex installation
> to rely on..... and what guarantee that every web 2.0 app will employ
> the same server side technology?  So, while I don't want to see
> Firefox become a huge juggernaut, I would love to see firefox be able
> to transparently parse tags from any of a half a dozen different text
> syntax into MathML for display.....  which argues client, not server
> side, parsing and display....

I humbly but strongly disagree.  This is an example of how the 'net has
been going the wrong way: Instead of a few, clean specs we have a
proliferation of competing technologies, many proprietary, that are
supported to various degrees by different platforms.  Instead of the
one-markup-fits-all dream behind the separation of content from
rendering, most Web pages are highly platform specific. Expecting
Mozilla to support different math content formats would go down the same
road, making things worse.

MathML is *the* format for marking up math. If it falls short, let's
improve it. May all browsers do their best to implement it.

How MathML is generated is none of Mozilla's business.  There's a dozen
ways to do it. The choice is on the content creator's side, and this is
a good thing.

Let's keep these two separate: The server does its best to produce clean
markup, and the client does its best to produce a clean rendering from
this markup. The cleaner the set of markups to support by either side,
the better for everyone.

Justus